>>PREVIEW
TWILIGHT HOTEL
Friday, March 24
A Bar Named Sue
Welcome to the Twilight Hotel, where the smiles at the cabaret hide the ache inside. Enter the Twilight Hotel, where your sins might bounce a cheque written on your overdrawn heart. Welcome, welcome, to the Twilight Hotel, where a lonely roots tune might twist you up with a vengeance.
For all the eerie and enchanting qualities of this cabaret palace, its proprietors, Dave Quanbury and Brandy Zand, are sunny and charming people a bit bemused at the adventurous and odd places their songs have journeyed.
The couple founded Twilight Hotel nearly three years ago after they went to the Winnipeg Folk Music Festival and figured that they could top most of what they saw. They have been joined romantically and musically ever since, and recently released their first album, Bethune. Bethune’s dozen tracks, by the way, live up to the band’s original premise, mainly because they stagger all over the musical road map and seldom colour inside the lines.
Zdan wonders if the lack of one musical direction might hinder the band’s chances for attention from labels on a larger scale.
"People like to put you in the bluegrass box or the folk box or whichever box so they can market you. It would be pretty tough to figure out which box to put us in," she says from the Winnipeg home she and Quanbury share.
"This is really our debut album, so it’s OK to have that variety. We’ve spent the last few years on the road every month or two, which really added to the variety of sounds we created."
She adds that the band may find a thread and follow it in one direction during the next album or two – or not. One of the band’s strengths, besides their interesting and varied tunes and moods, is that both Zdan and Quanbury have strong and versatile voices.
With their sweet voices and neat songs, they are the poster children for a musical love story that sounds almost too wonderful to be true. So, does Zdan ever worry that if the love affair curdles, the band will collapse?
"I always think not many couples spend 24 hours a day together. We’re surprised (we can). It’s wonderful – we’re always on the same page about what kind of food we want to eat, music we play, how we want to record things. People are always asking us that question, but it’s totally great. There are a lot of times when we don’t have much left to talk about at the end of the day, though.
"It’s also true about all the music couples – none of them work out very well. I guess if we talk again in five years, we’ll see what’s happened, but I think it will be cool, we’ll be like upping the ante every album." |
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